A roundup of news on drug resistance and other topics in global health.

As the meeting of the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to decide the fate of the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMFm) approaches, supporters and opponents of the program actively voice their research and opinions. In this Sciencenews article,
CDDEP’s Ramanan Laxminarayan worries that the recommendation by a
working group and a taskforce to integrate AMFm into the Global Fund’s
regular country activities would effectively bring an end to the
project. [ScienceMag]

November 12-18 is observed as the Get Smart About Antibiotics Week, an initiative created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). [CDC]

On
November 13 at 10am EST, CDDEP, in conjunction with CDC and 25 other
leading national health organizations, will unveil the details of an
unprecedented joint statement to fight against antibiotic resistance.
Find out more here. [CDDEP]

The UN’s Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) discusses the controversies surrounding AMFm. Citing new research
that shows that private pharmacies have handed out costly malaria drugs
indiscriminately due to the drug subsidies, NPR’s health blog also
furthers the discussion on the AMFm project. [IRIN, NPR]

Doug
Call, a molecular epidemiologist at Washington State University, will
be analyzing the ecological and socio-economic factors behind antibiotic
resistance with funding from the National Science Foundation. [WSU News]

A press release
by Weill Cornell Medical College reports that researchers at the school
have successfully used mass spectrometry to visualize how antibiotics
function inside bacteria. This research might enable scientists to
improve existing antibiotics and develop new antibiotics.

In
the past two years, the National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in the
UK have had a twofold increase in the number of patients getting
infected in hospitals, while the payouts to infected patients have
quadrupled in the past seven years. [Mirror]

Even
though India faces an epidemic of dengue fever that threatens hundreds
of millions of people, the disease is massively underreported in the
country. Watch Ramanan Laxminarayan discuss India’s dengue problem in this news segment for CNN-IBN. [NYTimes, IBN]

New research published in the journal mBio
shows that the long-term use of antibiotics in honey bees might have
weakened their resistance to other diseases and contributed to the
decline in their population in the US. [VoA]

According to a new study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, MRSA and MSSA
were found in all of the four wastewater treatment plants used in the
study, with the presence of the superbugs declining as treatment
progressed. [Medical News Today]

With
superbugs like the NDM-1 being reported in Hong Kong, the island could
be at risk of outbreaks of drug-resistant infections. [South China Morning Post]

Do
you have a background in object-oriented programming and a desire to
contribute to cutting-edge global health research? We may have job for you. [CDDEP]